Humor - You Make Me Smile

With most of the posts so far, I have either read a couple books or articles or been able to follow some sort of outline of experience with the topic. Here however, that will all change. What makes us smile? Why do we laugh? For what reason did we evolve humor? Why does laughing make me feel so good? Are funny people more attractive because of the way they make others feel? Why are some things funny to some people and not to others?

I love to laugh. I also love people that make me smile. It is amazing to find someone that you just can't stop smiling because of. I think humor and laughter are one of the closest things that we can share with someone. To be able to appreciate or have a similar sense of humor as someone means that you are probably very similar to that person in some sense. I often find that people look for friends that have a similar sense of humor as them. It's odd how we can bond over something that people may call frivolous or silly. Is the purpose of laughter to help us to relax, to make us happy, to put us at ease? The smile seems to be a cross-cultural sign of happiness and openness. So it seems that laughter is born into us.

However, how does laughter and humor actually work in the brain? To be honest, I have no idea (not to say that I have a real grasp on the other topics). If I was to guess, I would say that there would be some higher order cortical reasoning, perhaps in the frontal lobes combined with limbic system activation. But, sometimes when I study or think about something like this, I wonder if I do really want to know. Does learning about how something exactly works give a more full appreciation of something? I often say that I don't want to learn about something because it takes away from the fun and the mysterious aspects. Santa Claus is a lot more fun and intriguing when he is a jolly old man who flies reindeer and lives in the North Pole than when he is your parents. I guess this raises some of the ethical questions regarding neuroscience. Do we want to pinpoint areas in the brain that tell us someone is lying, a racist, ect.? There is a huge power in uncovering the inner workings of the mind. It has been protected by the other minds problem for years. How do we truly know that other people have minds and that they work like my own? By uncovering the mysteries of the mind, we are not only saying that other people have minds, but we are showing exactly how they work and what they are doing.

While these questions are raised, I am too curious to be detered by losing the mystery of the mind. While losing the mystery, it will be far to interesting to see what we can't now. It may also only open up a new realm of questions and mystery. How can we know when the search is over? It is so interesting to at least think that there is an infinite number of possibilities to study and research in the mind. So while I love to laugh and be humerous, today I can just live with that, however, tomorrow perhaps, I will look into how it works.

Smile - Robert Randolph and the Family Band